The burly veteran German baritone Matthias Goerne, a commanding vocalist if a sometimes intrusive physical presence onstage, and the brilliant yet retiring young Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov may seem an odd couple as recitalists. And their program at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evening was decidedly eccentric, yet utterly winning. Mr. Trifonov conceived the event as part of his Carnegie Perspectives series this season, and the respect and affinity he showed toward Mr. Goerne were clearly mutual.

Their program somewhat typically placed romantic love and loss at its core, with Schumann’s great song cycle “Dichterliebe” (“A Poet’s Love”); then it took a wide turn to Christian charity as its endpoint, in Brahms’s late, biblical “Four Serious Songs.” Otherwise it worked the fringes of the repertory with a subtext of death, in Berg’s early Four Songs (Op. 2); three songs to poems of Michelangelo by Wolf; and three more by Shostakovich.

But it was the manner of presentation that really set this intermissionless evening apart. By going immediately from one song to the next — and from one composer to the next — Mr. Goerne and Mr. Trifonov created an overall intensity that proved captivating. Though you would have thought the game had become obvious after the four songs by Berg and the 16 by Schumann, a sprinkling of listeners started to applaud after “Dichterliebe,” only to be squelched by an arresting gesture from Mr. Goerne and an immediate leap into the Wolf by Mr. Trifonov.

Still more striking, this unified fabric created new contexts for the various sets, placing each in a different light and revealing subtexts usually hidden. “Dichterliebe,” in fact, perhaps should have come with a spoiler alert. Its lovely opening song, “Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai” (“In the Wondrous Month of May”), is usually rendered in blithe fashion, giving little hint of the heartbreak ahead. But coming directly out of Berg’s death-haunted “Warm die Lüfte” (“Warm Are the Breezes”), Schumann’s opening took on a subdued, pensive air that made clear from the outset that this romance would come to no good end.

And in a stunning contrast, Wolf’s ultra-melodious treatments of somewhat static reflections by Michelangelo gave way immediately to Shostakovich’s more angular renderings of that Renaissance genius’s more politically charged defense of Dante, and his praise of sleep, oblivion and death in the face of vice and criminality. These songs carry the listener almost to the realm of, say, Mussorgsky’s “Songs and Dances of Death,” which Shostakovich orchestrated.

Mr. Goerne produced a consistently rounded tone, more big than intimate but well-suited to the acoustics of Carnegie Hall and capable of lightness as well as power. And his constant movement and gesticulation proved less distracting there than in smaller auditoriums. He was beautifully, understatedly supported at every turn by Mr. Trifonov, whose particular opportunities to shine came in extended postludes.

The performers ended with an encore of a simplicity ideally calculated to dispel the lingering tension: “Bist du bei Mir” (“If You Are With Me”), a little song from Bach’s “Anna Magdalena Book,” adapted from an aria by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel.

Matthias Goerne and Daniil TrifonovAppear next at the Konzerthaus in Vienna on Feb. 16; konzerthaus.at.